


The Road Not Taken: January Hymn

by fadeverb



Series: In Nomine: the Company [11]
Category: In Nomine
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 21:45:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5514437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadeverb/pseuds/fadeverb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten years on, Leo has a Knighthood. Which means certain visitation options have reopened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Road Not Taken: January Hymn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [byzantienne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne/gifts).



> A Christmas present, on request.

Some Tethers are bywords for impossible, on the matter of security. You wouldn't try to break into Notre Dame, would you? Except in my experience those aren't actually the tough ones to crack, if all you want is _inside_. Take a look at the number of tourists who show up in that place every day, even aside from the faithful. Big concepts attract big crowds. With the possible exception of Secrets, which has never made much sense to me on an organizational level, a big Tether worth giving serious protection to has to account for all the mortals wandering in and out doing the sorts of things that keep feeding Essence up to the Superior camping the other end. I have, in fact, walked into Notre Dame. It was a windy Tuesday morning, and Guo came with me in the body of a local. I was proving a point to him. He's a good kid, but not so great at figuring out when it's worth taking risks. Or just possible. Once burnt, twice shy, and he's twice shy about a lot of things.

There's a reason he's not with me right now, as I scale the wall of a Tether that's a damn sight harder to enter discreetly than that old cathedral was. And it's not just because he's lousy at climbing.

"For the record," Lanthano says from my earpiece, "I still think this is a bad idea."

Tap of my tongue against the roof of my mouth, in the right spot, conveys the general tenor of my response to him. Supposedly Technology has versions of this earpiece that can pick up on subvocalization, and give you effectively silent communication on the field with a minder back home. There was an ad campaign plastered over dozens of billboards the last time I hit Shal-Mari, which didn't mention the tendency those things have to fry your brain. For now, we're working on tech about half a generation back. Moderately reliable, moderately useful. It's not a bad trade-off. I've gotten fucked over my tech failing on me on a job, and not in the "What do you expect from a Calabite?" sense, either. I can _work_ with moderately useful, so long as the tech keeps on working in turn.

"I'm not saying this because I expect you to turn back," Lanthano continues. "It's only that I want it on the record that I advised against this, okay?" The mic he's using is sharp, like he's speaking right into my ear, but I can still hear background noise it's meant to filter out. The creak of his feet on the floorboards of the room he's standing in. He's pacing again. Hands in his pockets, watching the monitors, trying to come up with the right thing to say. I've watched him do it a dozen times for other people, and with other people, he's talked them out of bad moves before.

He knows how to pick the approach for me, too. Do I want him upset if something happens to me? Rather not. It's just not going to work on me this time. This particular deck of cards was shuffled years ago, and this particular hand has been waiting to be dealt all that time. It looks new, on his end, but it's not new at all. Not by my admittedly youthful standards; I suppose it might seem downright precipitous if I were as old as some people in the company.

I tap back my acknowledgment, and find another hold for my fingertips. This would be easier if I'd chosen my lightweight vessel, but that one has obligations that don't match so well with my evening plans. Rachel has a well-stamped passport, friends on five or six continents, a fucking _pedigree_ , as these kinds of Roles go. She might get into a few wild scrapes now and then, as women with too much money and too little serious employment are prone to doing, but she doesn't climb up the sides of office buildings in the US without so much as a recent entry visa.

Now, Ian? That bastard gets up to all sorts of things. I've seen portions of his Interpol file, and all I can say is that I'm pleased that even as technology marches onward, the human tendency to clutch information and not share it with rival organizations stays exactly the same.

"One meter," Lanthano says. "Last chance to turn back. Have you considered a letter? Nothing says tradition and respect like old-fashioned paper correspondence." The rumble in the background of his voice must be his latest cat, asking for attention or receiving it. Fluffy little creature with half a tail, and the comparisons Adrian has drawn between the types of pets Lanthano acquires and the kinds of demons he falls for have been both insulting and kinda accurate. "Leo..."

You can't get much of a system of communication out of where you tap your tongue against the roof of your mouth. Yes and no, danger and safety, onward and backward. I send him _onward_ , and haul myself neatly up to the windowsill I've been aiming for over this last--well, not only this last five stories of climbing, but the last few hours of work to be able to get here without setting off any alarms. The last several days of planning. The last several years of being on this trajectory, one way or another, and there are much worse ways I could be coming to this place. That's what Lanthano doesn't understand, and I haven't tried to explain it to him, because it's one of those things I don't talk about.

Except with Chaixin. She has to know these sorts of things. It's like having a confessor, in some ways. Give your weaknesses over to the Marquis, and she pours penance back into your palms. That's how we're still standing, with our sharp smiles and expensive clothes, years and years after most of Hell--well, the parts who cared--thought the company would collapse on itself. It's like spinning the tumblers of a lock. We can't crack so long as gaps don't line up.

I run a thin line of my resonance along the edges of the window in the right places, and try to push all these spinning metaphors out of my head. Might as well call myself a fall of the dice, and wouldn't that just be back in my ex's vernacular? But I still like the way poker works to explain the world. There's too much randomness for it to feel like it all comes down to physics.

In a different lifetime, when I set my feet on the carpet inside the room, I have a speech prepared that's nothing like my opening tonight.

But I'm in my own lifetime. This set of choices, this set of cards dealt, doing my best not to lose based on what I think everyone else is holding. And I am not, in the end, a cautious player, however much I sometimes think I should be.

"Hey, Penny," I say, to his back. "It's Leo. Nice to see you again."

He's standing by the time he's facing me. The chair at the desk spins, but of course he'd stand up. Still has a few inches on me, between these two vessels of ours, and he wears exactly the same kind of button-down outfit as ever. The one that projects _I am a serious Seraph_ without going straight into _...of Judgment_ territory. Just casual enough that he's not intimidating if he needs to speak to someone gently, which he's a lot better at than you'd expect of a Seraph. Same vessel as last time. I'm not sure he's ever lost one.

His expression is not one I've seen him wear before. But I think I've heard it across a phone line, once or twice. Years ago.

"I know." I spread my hands, and I'm oh so careful not to smile the wrong way. Friendly, not sharp. Pretend like I'm wearing a different body that suits that expression a little better, and maybe I should have come as Rachel, but it's too late for that decision to change now. "You haven't seen this one before. But it's the low-security one these days, so it seemed most appropriate for a visit. Are you going to call security on me? Because I can leave, if it's a problem."

He opens his mouth, and closes it again. Hands very still by his side, not reaching for the gun he carries. (Concealed, but not all that well. It's obvious if you bother to look for it.) "Not yet," he says at last.

"Might as well keep your options open."

"Would you like to sit down?"

It turns out I would like to sit down. I end up seated backwards on a second wheeled chair, my arms folded over its back, chin resting on them. It feels like old times. Body language from a different body, or maybe a different era, this; Zabina would never let me sit like this around her, and even though I'm not reporting to her directly, habits of good posture stick. As she meant them to. "They should give you a better chair. That one's going to put a nasty crick in your spine if you sit there for hours on end, doing whatever it is you do with spreadsheets, especially in that vessel."

I know quite a lot about what he does with spreadsheets, but that's neither here nor there.

He sits down across from me. At a distance that would be appropriate if there were a table between us, which there's not, but that's Penny for you. He is trying to have the kind of still, calm expression that he uses in--oh, interrogations, based on my experience, but he's not quite managing it. Bluffing isn't a common Seraphic skill.

"The last time I was in communication with you," he says, picking out every word with the care of someone whose native language isn't English, however flawlessly he speaks it, "your Marquis indicated that I ought not interact with you again. For my own safety."

"Yeah, well. Things changed." And then I have to talk fast, because I don't want to give him the wrong impression. "She lifted the restriction. Change of circumstances, greater responsibility, greater privileges, you know how it goes. Which is not to say that I picked up a Knighthood just so I could stop by and say hi again, but it's a nice perk, isn't it?"

Penny is full of long silences tonight. It's to be expected. I kick the feet of the chair, swiveling myself a few degrees left and right and back again, and wait for him. What he says at last is, "What did you do?"

"Remember that thing with the fusion reactor research, back in November?" I let myself have a Valefor smile, because he does remember. Just the one. There and gone, fast as sin. "You should have heard the reactions down in Hell. Fire and the War and Technology, like one episode of a multi-host reactionary radio talk show. It was fun. Not just what I did, though that _was_ fun, not going to lie. I'm good at what I do, Penny, I really am, even if I spend a lot more time climbing buildings these days and a lot less time blowing them up, compared to when I knew you."

His hands lie across his knees, very still. Not the kind of still that's casual, but the kind that means he'd rather be up and moving. Honestly, I can identify. "Will you find yourself in trouble for telling me this?" he asks.

"No. Wouldn't be here otherwise, or at least not chatting about these things. They're all old news, and unless you plan on dropping names to particular Words in Hell, it's no threat to me." I'm keeping my smiles down to reasonable levels, right? Maybe. A mirror would be handy, here. This body's made for sharp-toothed grins and not soft-footing any sentence it delivers. "And even that, not too dangerous. It would be more surprising if people didn't look our way, when there's an exciting round of industrial espionage. It's what we _do_."

"The Word," Penny says. "Of course." He's not being so quiet because he's anything short of clever, but because he's working through a lot of new data as fast as he can. I know how it goes. "Leo. Why are you here?"

There are a lot of things I could say to that. Some of them more true than others. If I weren't talking to a Seraph--well, if I weren't talking to a Seraph, I wouldn't be here, so the whole theoretical concept collapses like one of those logical paradoxes. (Something like "This sentence is false," which does not, despite what some movies from Shal-Mari have claimed, give Seraphim paralyzing headaches.) So I settle on, "I wanted to know if you missed me."

Another one of those processing silences. I can picture the whirling eyes that the little gremlin icon on the VapuTech computers pops up whenever I ask more of the machine than it can give me.

"That's almost true," Penny says, at last.

"And that's not an answer." I jam a foot into the feet of the chair to hold myself still, looking him directly in the eyes. Only two to each of us, in this form. Once upon a time I saw his dreamshape, which looked like what his celestial form does, and how likely is that to come up again? Not very. So I can only imagine the six eyes blinking down at me, a ripple of two by two by two. "I've missed this. When you call me out on imprecision, evasion, and outright lying. What about you? Years since we last talked, and did you ever think of me?"

"Yes," Penny says. No hesitation. "Often."

That leaves me as the one with a pause to process. I had a much better answer ready for if he'd said something else.

There's only one plausible route with a Seraph. Well. Two, but blatant lying comes out to about the same thing anyway, and it's much more rude.

"I've missed you," I say. Truth, as best I know. "Not constantly. Off and on. I think about you when people talk about finances, or contracts, or persuasion by means of what people really need, which comes up an awful lot of the time when you're apprenticing to a Lilim." I sit up, chin off my arms. It's the kind of conversation that demands a slightly more formal posture. (I can still hear Zabina's voice in my head, one of those lectures on body language and etiquette and how to convey respect, or the lack of it, or any of the many fine and specific gradations between.) "She's a good teacher. I learned a lot. But, you know. Trade, Lilim. I could hardly not think of you often, under the circumstances."

"You could have," Penny says.

I pick a thread loose from the fabric of the chair, with the sharp corner of a fingernail. "Just because you believe it's true doesn't mean it _is_ true. Didn't you tell me that?"

"It was a possibility," Penny says, "which I had to consider. That, having discovered a less oppressive part of Hell, you would stop thinking about old connections that gave you some outlet before."

I pull a single thread free. Bland gray. Not much for it to do, without the rest of the fabric around it. "Did you really think that was it? That I only found you interesting because my partner was a controlling asshole? I'm not that--" I don't have the right word for it, which is unusual for me, at least in this language. Still throws me off in some others, now and again. My European languages are generally better than my Asian ones. Yuliang blames Zabina for that, but then, Yuliang blames a lot of things on Zabina. "Do you know how Katherine is, these days?"

"No," Penny says. "I'm sorry."

"She's probably fine. I expect she is. Judgment's made of authoritarian legalistic fascists, but they should able to protect a single mortal kid when no one is particularly going after her." I pull out a second thread, and spin them between my fingers. "Chaixin offered to steal her for me, once. Well. More than once."

Penny is silent. So I might as well keep talking.

"I said no. I mean, seriously. What would I do with a kid? I had my own work, it would just rile up Judgment, and I expect she's _fine_. Maybe they turned her into a lawyer. It wouldn't be the worst fate. She was pretty good at parsing the exact wording of promises and rules when she was a kid, anyway."

"Do you miss her?" Penny asks.

"Never."

"Liar."

I smile at him, and there's nothing about the Boss in that version. Just...I don't know. Affection? It's the same smile I use on Lanthano, a lot of the time. "Does it count as lying if I know the person listening can hear the real version through it?"

"Yes," Penny says.

"Most Holy, you can be awfully black and white about these things at times." I slouch back down over my arms on the chair. Just like old times, except for everything that's changed. "Are you going to get in trouble because I stopped by?"

"Not likely," he says. "Judgment will ask questions."

"Awkward."

"No, not very. I tell them the truth. They may disapprove, but I have the approval from on high sufficient to justify myself."

"Judgment and justice," I say, "are not exactly the same. Not in this language."

"Whatever their judgment, then, they are unlikely to prosecute." He tilts his head a little to one side. I'm a subject of examination, and I think that under very different circumstances, he would ask how I've been. Maybe not this time. He may not want the answer. "Are they the same in your language?"

"My language is English," I say. "Not my first, but it's still the one I like best. The topic of Latinate roots, which I know _far_ more about than I wanted to a decade ago, should wait for another time. How have you been?"

Penny shrugs one shoulder. "Well enough," he says. "All considered."

So he's less forthcoming about what he's been up to lately than I am. That's fair. He spends a lot of his time in Heaven, which can't be very interesting, and he's got more to worry about than I do.

"Good," I say. "Glad to hear it."

"Leo."

"Yes, Penny?"

"You've broken into a Trade Tether," he says, "with what I thought was reasonably good security, just to say hello?"

"Yes. Pretty much. I mean--Theft. It's what I do."

"You," Penny says, with the closest I've heard to affection from him in this whole meeting, "are showing off."

"Can you blame me?"

He lifts a hand into the air, and tilts it slowly from one side to another.

"God," I say. "I have missed you."

"I have been waiting for you," Penny says. "I thought that if I ever saw you again, it would be under...different circumstances."

"But you never pressed."

He makes a face. Yes. There's that.

"I mean," I say, "that's the thing. I wouldn't be here, except that I know you won't. There's that promise you made to me years ago, and it's still true today. Solid as a Geas. It's something I've thought about, along the way."

He's finally found the mask of calm that he was trying to wear earlier, though I don't think it's any more authentic now. "Has it ever occurred to you that I might take the dissonance as a fair penalty for breaking a promise, if the potential gain were high enough?"

"Yes," I say. I have three threads now, and I'm turning them into a tiny dull braid. Here's me, and Penny, and what lies between us, and it'll become a fragile object without much interest, because it's a physical object and not a proper metaphor. "I thought about it. If anything, my problem is overthinking things, not underthinking them. But I came to the conclusion a long time ago that you wouldn't. The sort of person who'd take dissonance to give me a hard sell on Heaven, or lure me into a trap, wouldn't be Penny."

"You're sure of that?"

"After what you did to get me out of that War Tether? Yes. And I was pretty near convinced before that, anyway." I fold the braid over itself until it's a messy little ball that's not anything at all. "Want to tell me I'm wrong?"

After a while, Penny says, "I don't know what you do with this confidence in me."

"I don't know either. Not exactly. It's just nice to have it there. Princes rise and Princes fall, coworkers come and go, I change Word service more often than some mortals change address, but Peniel, Seraph of Trade, can be relied on to keep his promises."

We sit there in silence for about a minute. Doesn't sound like that long, but without anyone talking, it drags out. I don't mind particularly. It's nice to see him again. Same narrow features, clear eyes, high cheekbones, long fingers. And this time around, I could name what store he bought his clothes from, and how much they cost. It makes me want to take him to a proper tailor. The fit's not bad, but he could do better, and he could portray business casual just as well with better quality clothes.

Oh, the things Zabina's taught me. Sometimes I think about what I was wearing, the last few times I ran into Penny, and I almost want to cringe.

"Without any undue pressure being exerted," Penny says, quite suddenly, "why not?"

A fair question. "Imagine," I say, "that after a life of the kind of work you do, someone suggested you work for a different Superior. Maybe someone pretty reasonable. I don't know who that is for Trade. The Wind? And the only cost, see, was that you wouldn't be able to do math anymore. Couldn't really count higher than five, not without using your fingers. Couldn't multiple two single-digit numbers without a calculator. Because who needs that in Wind, anyway? And they'll teach you how to run off sonnets, at the drop of a hat, in exchange. Plus, you'd have to leave almost all your friends behind, and there's a slight chance of death on the way, but, you know. Sonnets! Who wouldn't want to be good at those?"

"It's not like that," Penny says. But he's a Seraph. He says, a moment later, "Not entirely."

"Not entirely."

He lets out a breath. At least his hands have relaxed, where they're splayed across his knees. "I don't know what to do with you, Leo."

"Well. You can call Tether security, and tell them to look over their western approach. It'll give them something fun to do."

"Or you could tell me what flaw you found in our security."

"I could," I say, "but then your people wouldn't have any fun looking for it." I choose a smile that's not half so vicious as the Valefor one. Friendly, really. Affectionate. I use it on real friends, not just Role ones. "I'll be by again, okay? So don't worry about me too much."

"I will probably worry anyway," Penny says, so softly I would've missed it in a louder room than this silent one. If I weren't focusing on him so intently already.

I steal a kiss from him before I leave. The principle of the thing.

#

"Well," Lanthano says, in the earpiece.

"Well, what?" I'm doing something near eighty on the highway, with the drifting snow caught in the beams of my headlights. Tiny white dots being destroyed by the car I'm driving, or blown away by the way a vehicle of this profile whips through the air. There are excellent diagrams in some of my more technical books as to how it works.

"Well, I don't know," he says. "That's all archived, but I'm not exactly going to start forwarding it to the company mailing list."

"Thanks."

"No problem, sir."

"Oh, don't start on that." I'm watching the speedometer. Eighty is fine. Much over eighty, in the dark and snow? Probably a bad idea. Even if the snow's still light and uncertain, barely started since I left the city. The forecast says it'll be no more than half an inch overnight for most of the drive, but forecasts are only so accurate this decade. "I assume you've sent a copy to Chaixin already, but, yes, I could do without Adrian's comments on any of this."

"I just don't understand it," Lanthano says. "I mean, if you were trying to push--"

"Never. He would do as well in Stygia as I would in Heaven." I whip into the left lane to pass a lumbering semi. "And let's leave that without comment."

"Wasn't going to say a thing."

"See, this is why I like you, Thano."

"Among other reasons." He's amused, or pretending to be. That's my favorite Impudite, and his willingness to not poke people in their sore spots. "Check in when you hit Chicago, would you?"

"On the dot."

He gives me radio silence, because he understands some things.

I watch my headlights destroy a thousand snowflakes after another thousand. Little white dots, here and gone. That's all of us, isn't it? Making the best of the time we've got, because nothing lasts forever.

And for now, I'm driving into the promising dark. I have more options than I did last week. It'll be fine.


End file.
